What comes first, the chicken or the baby?
If we love someone and enjoy spending time with that person and do not have any desire to be with anyone else, why are we so scared to move forward. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this and wondering, WHY are we so afraid?
Last night I spent several hours on the phone with two girlfriends.
The first one we will call Ann. Ann lives many many miles away from me. She is someone I have known all my life and someone whom I share pretty much everything with. She has been in a relationship with someone for almost two years and has lived with this person for awhile until recently. They went their separate ways due to career changes on both of their parts. They are still a “couple” but do not live together anymore. We got into some pretty deep conversation last night and started talking about marriage, relationships, etc. It is her belief that two people should not cohabitate without being engaged. Not because she thinks it is a sin because she thinks Who is gonna buy the cow if you get the milk for free kind of thing. I on the other hand am terrified to make that sort of commitment without testing the waters. How do two people know if they can live together forever if they haven’t tried first?
My next friend that I talked to, we will call her Alex. Alex is six months pregnant and is in a relationship with the father with no future plans on marriage. Her outlook is “If it works, it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t”. A lot of women in her position would be terrified that they were going to end up raising their child alone and without a significant other to help. Not Alex. She is very independent and knows that she will do just fine on her own. She is not willing to settle for someone who gives her less than butterflies just because he knocked her up.
So why is it that we have changed our moral standards so much over the years? When my grandparents were “courting” there was never talk of living together or having babies before marriage. Now we do things in whatever order we want? So are we lowering our standards? Are we decreasing the value of family? Do we give up on each other too easily? OR do we just value our own happiness more than we used to? Are we just more open minded to the order in which life can happen?
We all have a different way of living our lives. As long as you are making decisions that make you happy and are not hurting others around you then I say live the way you want to live, marry when you want to marry, have babies when you are damn ready and if you don’t like babies, don’t have any. Nobody said that just because we are adults we have to reproduce. Baby yourself if you can. Be you and march to the beat of your own drum.
